MTGO April 2017 Power 9 Challenge

lost my win and in with pitch dredge. deck is still great, restricting probe was actually good for the deck since it forced me to play more mindbreak traps (which are much better in this slower metagame)

@arj he's got 6 Duress effects might just try to plow through them at sorcery speed, in Storm sometimes you want to start the Misstep fight on your turn anyway to bait additional storm. Vs. Thorns you have a reasonable chance to disrupt a weak hand on the play. Nice to see a deck that's outside the Thorns vs. Missteps duality.

"when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" - Crovax

@nedleeds Agree that it is an interesting list. I've played a lot of storm but stopped playing ritual when misstep was introduced. The tempo difference is just huge. That it also takes duress is just icing in the cake for them.

@arj Misstep can definitely break some storm hands apart but it isn't like it just wins you the game or anything even remotely similar.
1- None of the ritual bombs you really want to stop cost 1 mana (unless you want to count ancestral).
2- Dark ritual decks have such a density of 1 mana spells that they can easily bait your missteps out and resolve their key 1 mana setup spell.
3- The deck is broken enough that it can easily go through multiple missteps with other counters and still win.
4- Misstep will only buy you time and you will need more disruption to back it up. (IE missteping a duress won't do you much good if you don't have more counters to stop the threats).
5- Long ago wizards printed a card called Defense grid.

Ritual decks still have a favorable blue matchup, the only real problem for them are decks like white eldrazi and to a lesser extent workshops. Back in 2011, Misstep didn't make the deck go away (nor mindbreak trap, nor flusterstorm for that matter), lodestone golem and friends did.

I'll have more to say on the list later tonight but Misstep is just one of those things you have to play around... it's really not that bad to have a Ritual mistepped if you have a backup plan; but usually they just trade with Duress and before Ritual was always a -1 for the storm deck and now it breaks even; that's not that bad. And then you figure on playing around Flusterstorm by going for Mentor or Necro... and if they Misstep your Ritual while Mentor is in play, then it doesn't matter. And I opted to play Kambals rather than Defense Grids because they simultaneously deal with Misstep and improve the combo matchup.i also expected mana based to be bigger so defense grid would
Be less effective

I tried that punishing oath deck for a short time and it was miserable for me, but I've seen it work well for people. Perhaps it had more to do with the fact that I wasn't playing against the decks where punishing fire was good, I don't know. Every time I had Loam in hand I seemed to be facing decks that it was too slow against, and the vast majority of my wins came from just landing an early Oath (which made me question why I wasn't just running one of my older lists).

The top eight seemed really interesting though. I liked some of what was going on.